Sendwithus lets you easily and painlessly create transactional emails for all of your applications. Wesley Yu from Sendwithus.com walks us thought their recently released collection of free open source email survey templates and how you can use them as a free & easy way to measure your Net Promoter® Score with Wufoo. Take it away Wesley!

Here’s a Net Promoter® Score (NPS) program that you can launch today to grow your product or service. It’s easy to implement on a limited budget, and it’s a great place to start when you don’t have a lot of resources to invest.

Wait, What’s a Net Promoter Score?

The Net Promoter Score is one of the most recognized ways to measure customer loyalty. It’s used figure out the lowest cost of keeping current customers and the best way to acquire new ones. To measure your NPS, all you need to do is ask one simple question:

“How likely is it that would you recommend our company to a colleague or friend?”

The Problem with NPS

The trouble with NPS programs is that gathering and storing Net Promoter Scores can be difficult (and/or expensive). Luckily, we have a free hack that you can implement in about 20 minutes to start gathering and storing your NPS data.

Step One: Download a Responsive NPS Survey Template

Download an NPS survey template
You’ll use these HTML email templates to gather your NPS data. You can edit the template directly or you can import it into your email template manager to brand the email for you own company.*
*If you don’t have an email template manager, try Sendwithus.com – it’s free!

Step Two: Create a Wufoo Form for your NPS data

We’ll be using Wufoo manage our NPS data. If you don’t have an account, sign up for free at wufoo.com. When you get to the Wufoo dashboard, hit “Create a New Form,” under the “Forms” tab. That should bring you to the form builder. Create a form with these 4 elements:

Title Message

Paragraph Box for Additional Feedback

0 – 10 Multiple Choice Field

Email Address Field

Step Three: Create Custom URLs to Pre-populate your Wufoo Form

In order to connect click data from your NPS survey to Wufoo’s database, you’ll need a way to pre-populate your Wufoo form. You can do this using custom URLs. The basic URL of a Wufoo form looks like this:

http://username.wufoo.com/forms/form-name

If you click that URL, you’ll go to a form with no predefined values. But, if you add some custom values to the end of the URL, then the form will pre-populate with the assigned values. Like this:

Wufoo allows you to populate forms with whatever data you like. In the example above we’ve passed in an email address variable, but it will accept any variable you throw at it – name, date, location, marital status, whatever. To write your custom URLs for you own Wufoo form:

Head to the “Forms” tab

Find the form you would like to pre-populate

Click “Code”

Then, Click “API Information” (in the top right corner)

Each Field Title has a corresponding API ID. The API ID is the number you use to reference a field. So, a field with an API ID of 5 will become:

Field5

The custom URL for a pre-populated form that includes a customer’s email and an NPS response of 5 might look like this:

Step Five: Map your Custom Wufoo URLs to the NPS Email Template

Okay, time to dive into the HTML of your NPS email template* that you downloaded in step one. Each response (from 0 – 10) is a separate image, so enter the corresponding Wufoo URL as a link in the HTML.

Now, when customers click their response in the email they get a pre-populated Wufoo form, like this:

Step Six: Hide the Pre-Populated NPS Fields in your Form

Because we’ve pre-populated the multiple-choice and email fields with the data gathered through our NPS email, let’s hide those two fields. To hide a Wufoo field:

Click “Field Settings”

Select the field you would like to hide

Type the word “hide” in the “Add CSS Layout Keywords” field.

Now, after a customer clicks a response they get this:

Voilà!

Now you have fully functional NPS Email that takes advantage of Wufoo’s analytics and reports.

Step Seven: Sending your NPS Survey

NPS surveys tell you how customers feel about your company. They’ll tell you which leads to nurture and where to improve your product to reduce churn. But, when should you gather NPS data? Mass emailing customers with NPS surveys once or twice a year will give you an annual or biannual Net Promoter health check, but NPS surveys are most effective right after a customer has had a meaningful interaction with your company. Important points to gather NPS data are:

After a Purchase

After a Free Trail

After a Blog Signup

Gathering data at these points will give you a constant measure of your Net Promoter Score as customers interact with key parts of your product. To automatically send an NPS survey after a customer has taken an action, head to Sendwithus.com and start a Drip Campaign. You can trigger a survey email after your customers have received an email or after they’ve triggered an API call.

That’s it - now go and measure your Net Promoter Score for free. Export the .CSV (or if you want to send it straight to sendwithus, using Zapier let us know beta@sendwithus.com) manage your customers, and make sense of your data!

PS - We’d love to hear how this works out for you. Leave us a comment, shoot us an email at Hello@sendwithus.com, or hit us up on Twitter.

@Jay: correct, that’s one loop hole in this implementation. It’s a tradeoff to get a quick NPS implementation up and running like this.

One way to ensure your customers submit their feedback would be to change the title of the form to be the description line of “Your feedback is incredibly important to us!” so that it doesn’t seem like the user has already submitted their response.

From the first comment, I have a follow up question to see if it resolves that issue. Is it possible to have the email recipient select the option in the email and then have the form open with the option they indicated in the email to help encourage and guide them to click submit?

@Heather: the option selected in the email will automatically select the appropriate option in the form, so the way to make sure someone filled out the NPS form would be to change the title of the form.